Celebrity Spotlight: Anderson Cooper No Longer Hides His Dyslexia
By The Understood Team

CNN’s Anderson Cooper is known for diving into the personal stories behind the news. But the six-time Emmy winner has a compelling backstory of his own.
The longtime host of Anderson Cooper 360° was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child. And even now, he’s grateful to reading specialists for the role they played in his career success.

A Rocky Road to Reading“I grew up in a home where reading and writing had great value,” Cooper has said. His brother was “a voracious reader,” always carrying a book around with him. So Cooper did the same. But he admits, “I would just pretend to read it, because I had trouble reading and making sense of words, in particular, letters.”At his private school in New York City, his teachers noticed his reading issues, which led to his dyslexia diagnosis. Cooper recalls that he worked with a reading specialist several times a week. “One way she helped was to encourage me to find books that I was really passionate about,” he’s shared.
Cooper became a strong student, and went on to graduate from Yale. He started his journalism career straight out of college. But Cooper had no intention of easing into his chosen field. Instead, he went to the front lines, with a home video camera in hand.
An Emotional Career Kick-Off“I don’t think it’s an accident that I became a war correspondent. I’m interested in stories of survival: how some people make it through desperate times and others don’t,” Cooper has said.
Cooper, whose mother is designer Gloria Vanderbilt, has survived personal tragedy and loss in his own life. His father died when Cooper was 10. His brother committed suicide when he was a young adult.
Those experiences propelled Cooper to start his career covering impoverished and war-torn countries. He sold his early reports to Channel One, the classroom news network that Lisa Ling (who has ADHD) also worked on.
From there, he became one of the youngest correspondents ever at ABC. Many reporting and cohosting jobs followed, until Anderson Cooper 360° aired in September 2003.
Gratitude for His Early Help With DyslexiaCooper has said that even people who have known him for a long time are surprised to learn he has dyslexia.
“I think it’s a sign of probably how well I tried to hide it when I was a little kid. I remember at the time being concerned that other people would find out about it.” Cooper made those remarks at an event for the National Center for Learning Disabilities, a founding partner of Understood.
“To a child with a learning disability, school can be an incredibly isolating place,” Cooper said. But a school with understanding teachers changed that for him: “It made all the difference in my life early on. And the good news is that there are great schools out there, able to provide the necessary resources and support.”

Also from Instagram today, a photographer posted a few photos of Anderson ~

6 comments:

I've become accustomed to Anderson having two hours, I am disappointed to hear it but I guess it's not totally unexpected. It's interesting that Wolf and Don Lemon still are keeping their extra hours but AC, whose been so loyal and hardworking at CNN, loses one of his and the currently hot Jake Tapper hasn't been able to move into primetime so far. Chris Cuomo's prime time ratings weren't much better than Anderson's. It could be that Anderson doesn't care about this change and may have welcomed it, but I'll watch Rachel Maddow live and catch Cuomo on rerun if he does something interesting--I do like when Cuomo calls out the lying Trumpies and GOP but I like it when Anderson does it more.

Cuomo and Tapper were Zucker hires, right, and he has been wanting both to become the face of CNN ever since he took over. Last year was all about promoting Tapper (THR cover, GQ cover etc), this year it is Cuomo's turn. One major advantage both have over Anderson is that they are friends with everyone in DC. The THR article about Cuomo's move has quotes from "his longtime friend Kellyanne Conway" and the Mooch congratulating him. And access seems to matter to Zucker. Anderson on the other hand actively avoids socializing with politicians. But yes, I am disappointed for Anderson, he deserves better and always has. but not surprised. Zucker always gives the big interviews to Tapper and Cuomo. I think that's why Anderson took the Stormy interview to 60 minutes and why he only promotes 60 min on twitter now. Though he does love his CNN team and show. But he had the only CNN show in the top 10 in the demo last month and the only one in top 25 overall. So slashing his hours while Blitzer gets 3 and Lemon 2, and Tapper has a daily show as well as the Sunday morning show is unfair.

ATA team, thank you for posting the extras. It is remarkable that Anderson went from a kid with dyslexia to a world renowned journalist. Just shows what can be accomplished with the right guidance. Unfortunately our schools seem to be moving in the wrong direction under DeVos, but there are wonderful charities that seek to help under-privileged kids with dyslexia get the help they need.

@aries moon & Pragya, After hearing the news of AC360 being cut to 1 hour my thoughts take a different direction than yours. Could it be that Anderson wants to pursue his other journalistic interests and wanted to lighten his load at CNN? I think the content of 360 has steadily gone down hill in the last few years and I only see rare glimpses of what it was in the beginning. That Anderson has been writing the openings highlighting the hypocrisy of the current administration has been an improvement but those mega panels have been a snooze fest for viewers & maybe for him too. Please consider that he may have played a part in this decision to make 360 1 hour.

You are right. He did drop some hints a few times about how exhausted he was having to do 2 hours, and how he wanted to go back to one. And he does seem *lost* on CNN... very diff from 60 minutes. I still think Zucker is partly to blame though, if only in that Anderson and his styles don't seem to mesh.